THE UMWELT OF THE UNANSWERABLE

MARIA POPOVA

Reader, writer, founder of Brain Pickings

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Thinking isn’t mere computation—it’s also cognition and contemplation, which inevitably lead to imagination. Imagination is how we elevate the real toward the ideal, and this requires a moral framework of what is ideal. Morality is predicated on consciousness and on having a self-conscious inner life rich enough to contemplate the question of what is ideal. The famous aphorism attributed to Einstein—“Imagination is more important than knowledge”—is interesting only because it exposes the real question worth contemplating: not that of artificial intelligence but of artificial imagination.

Of course, imagination is always “artificial,” in the sense of being concerned with the unreal or trans-real—of transcending reality to envision alternatives to it—and this requires a capacity for accepting uncertainty. But the algorithms driving machine computation thrive on goal-oriented executions in which there’s no room for uncertainty. “If this, then that” is the antithesis of imagination, which lives in the unanswered, and often vitally unanswerable, realm of “What if?” As Hannah Arendt once wrote, losing our capacity for asking such unanswerable questions would be to “lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”10

Whether machines will ever be able to ask the unanswerable questions that define true thought is essentially a question of whether they’ll ever evolve consciousness.

But historically, our criteria for consciousness have been limited by the solipsism of the human experience. As recently as the seventeenth century, René Descartes proclaimed “Cogito ergo sum,” implying that thinking is a uniquely human faculty, as is consciousness. He saw nonhuman animals as automata—moving machines, driven by instinct alone. And yet here we are today, with some of our most prominent scientists signing the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that nonhuman animals do indeed possess consciousness and, with it, interior lives of varying degrees of complexity. Here we are, too, conducting experiments demonstrating that rats—rats—display moral behavior.

Will machines ever be moral, imaginative? It’s likely that if and when they reach that point, theirs will be a consciousness that isn’t beholden to human standards. Their ideals will not be our ideals, but they will be ideals nonetheless. Whether or not we recognize those processes as thinking will be determined by the limitations of human thought in understanding different—perhaps wildly, unimaginably different—modalities of thought itself.